Linked by Iain Alexander on Thu 17th Apr 2003 07:28 UTC
Several days ago I wrote a rather scathing article about my utter dismay and disappoint with Mandrake 9.1 and by association, Linux as a whole. Since then I have had many many flames and equally as many agreeing emails (is there a simple opposite word for flame?) Since then I have been trying, really really trying to get my system working fully. But time and again I'm coming up against the same brick wall of (un)usability, computer esotericism and down right idiocy. 
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This poor man seems to have had a truly bad experience with Linux. I sympathise with him greatly, but in addition I'd like to make a few points as well:
1. DeCSS - this is a legal issue, not a Linux issue per se. Unfortunately companies are (rightly) scared of being sued off the face of the earth if they include DeCSS - or Mplayer with encrypted DVD support - at the moment. The long-term fix for this is to write to your democratic representitives and/or the music industry to campaign for a more open acceptance of this sort of software.
2. Drivers - I agree entirely. ISDN is a real problem in Linux for starters, and overall driver support is pretty terrible at the moment. We need a standardized virtualization layer between the kernel & XFree86 and the driver subsystem to allow for "Linux" drivers to be written - as opposed to "Mandrake" or "Red Hat" or "SuSE" drivers. Linux's open APIs and kernel code should be an advantage, but at the moment it's not.
3. Commercial offerings - A lot of long-time Linux users assume that your average new Linux user will know - or be able to find out - that to get the functionality they need, they can just download X and Y file from the Internet. Fact is, a lot of users either (a) believe that an application will actually work out of the box and/or (b) don't have the experience to do so. Let me tell you -- it's really easy to stick with what you know, so when something goes wrong, people are much, much more likely to go back to the familiar "old faithful" than brave a new world. You may not like it - but it's true. To break through the scare-factor and the inertia of the familiar, Linux has the be better than Windows at setting itself up for the user. Not set up properly after a few hours of downloading (and not everyone has broadband), but out of the box! At present, as has been illustrated time and time again, it's not.
4. Articles critical of Linux - I agree with a lot of points raised by these sort of articles (although they can be a bit "over the top" ;-)), and I applaud OSNews.com for publishing them. Keep up the good work!